Many merchants distribute to customers various promotions that are designed to encourage the customers to purchase the merchants' goods and services. These promotions typically take the form of discount coupons, advertising, recommendations, and other purchasing incentives for various merchant offerings. Promotions, such as discount coupons, oftentimes are delivered to customers in their homes via mass mailings, in stores via kiosks and check-out stands, and on a computer via online browsing or online shopping.
In order to reduce costs and avoid annoying customers with promotions that do not meet their interests, merchants strive to target their promotions in ways that will be best received by customers. To this end, great efforts have been made to develop profiles that reveal the most effective ways to stimulate customers to purchase merchant offerings. Various customer profiling techniques have been developed. These techniques typically use information about a customer, such as demographics information and purchase history information, to build a model that reveals the customer's particular tastes and interests. Developing an accurate profile of a customer, however, is difficult.
One of the main challenges inhibiting the development of an accurate customer profile is the inability to access sufficient information about the customer. Oftentimes it is difficult to obtain accurate demographic information and to obtain a comprehensive set of purchase history data. Even assuming that the customer uses a common identifier (e.g., a loyalty card) for all his or her purchases, these purchases typically are tracked only by the merchant that issued the identifier to the customer. In addition, although consumers typically prefer to receive targeted promotions that match their interests instead or undifferentiated promotions, consumers typically are reluctant to allow indiscriminate access to their personal demographic data and purchase records.
What are needed are improved systems and methods for delivering targeted promotions to customers.